FRANKFURT: The world is closer to the dark days of the 1930s than at any time since, Canadian author Margaret Atwood said on Saturday in Frankfurt, where she was due to receive a prestigious German literary award. Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, first published in 1985, has shot back up the bestseller lists after […]

FRANKFURT: The world is closer to the dark days of the 1930s than at any time since, Canadian author Margaret Atwood said on Saturday in Frankfurt, where she was due to receive a prestigious German literary award.

Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, first published in 1985, has shot back up the bestseller lists after being made into an award-winning TV series depicting a totalitarian future in a United States where women are forced into sexual servitude.

Donald Trump’s election as US president has, for some critics, brought that vision closer to reality as he uses social media to browbeat opponents, and lawmakers in a number of states seek to restrict women’s reproductive rights.

“It feels the closest to the 1930s of anything that we have had since that time,” the 77-year-old Atwood told a news conference, drawing parallels with the fascist and communist regimes which then ruled parts of Europe.

Atwood was attending the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, where she receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on Sunday. The award citation praises Atwood’s “political awareness and alertness for developments beneath the surface”.

“That is one of the reasons that the show has been so popular … people suddenly feel that it’s a possible reality for them,” she said.

Women’s rights activists clad in the distinctive white bonnets and red gowns worn by handmaids in the fictional theocratic state of Gilead have taken part in recent protests in several U.S. state capitals.

“The book has escaped from the covers, the television show has escaped from being just a show,” said Atwood.

ISTANBUL: Turkey's leaders are taking the country on a path towards totalitarianism, US-based preacher and arch-enemy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Fethullah Gulen, wrote in an article published Tuesday.

Gulen, who rarely makes comments in public, accused the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of a clampdown on civil society in an opinion piece published in the New York Times.

The comments came after Turkish authorities arrested dozens of Gulen’s supporters in Turkey in recent months. They were suspected of seeking to overthrow Erdogan, who has dominated the country for over a decade.

“The AKP’s leaders now depict every democratic criticism of them as an attack on the state,” Gulen wrote in the piece entitled “Turkey’s Eroding Democracy”.

“By viewing every critical voice as an enemy —- or worse, a traitor —- they are leading the country toward totalitarianism.”

He said that an “historic opportunity” for Turkey to become a progressive state with a real chance of EU membership had been “squandered” in the AKP’s crackdown on civil society and the media.

Pennsylvania-based Gulen has lived in exile in the United States since 1999, a time when the secular authorities charged him with seeking to destroy the state.

For several years he was seen as a close ally of the Islamic-rooted AKP and Erdogan. But in 2013 the authorities blamed Gulen for corruption allegations that rocked Erdogan and the ruling elite, and launched an all-out war against him and his supporters.

The opinion piece identified Gulen, 73, who rarely emerges from his well-guarded compound, as an “Islamic scholar, preacher and social advocate.” He did not identify Erdogan by name in the article.

Gulen leads a broad movement known as “Hizmet” (Service) believed to be supported by millions of Turks, and which has established hundreds of schools across the world.

Erdogan accuses the movement of being a “parallel state,” but Gulen said that Hizmet members “have never formed a political party nor have they pursued political ambitions.”

He said the rhetoric used by the AKP to crack down on the group was “a pretext to justify their own authoritarianism.”

Gulen acknowledged that Hizmet once supported the AKP, but said its members were now victims of a “witch hunt”.

A newspaper and television channel loyal to Gulen had been targeted by police raids in December, prompting the European Union to accuse Ankara of eroding press freedoms. -AFP